Monday, March 1, 2010

Malware on a Blogger blog?

Any of you who followed my previous blog may have noticed that Google flagged it for a week or so as probably distributing malware. Blogger hosts my blog, I could not understand how it got uniquely infected somehow. I tried various things, that did not work until I discovered/remembered the problem: I had been trying to mess with the Yahoo Buzz icon javascript. I left it in a broken state and so Google saw misbehaving javascript and gave my site the axe.

Having gone through this experience, I can now offer some suggestions and tips to those in a similar situation. Google offers a number of tools to help. First, there is the site diagnostic. For my old blog, it is http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=ncooprider.blogspot.com. Simply replace ncooprider.blogspot.com with the site you want to check out. As of right now, you can still see the remnants of the error on the site's diagnostic page.

Google also directs webmasters to http://stopbadware.org/home/security. I found the site informative, but not helpful for my particular problem. I went on the forums and posted a couple of times, but I think my posts were too newbie-ish and/or hopeless. You can see one here and the other here. The one response I did get was right on, but it was still a little vague for me.

The most informative site was the Google Webmaster tools site. I went to the dashboard for my old blog and saw a warning which explained where Google was seeing the error. It did not completely narrow down the problem, but it provided more direction than any of the previous utilities.

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